Exodus 4:16

Summary

The verse describes the division of roles between Aaron and Moses: Aaron will speak to the people on Moses' behalf, functioning "as a mouth" for him, while Moses will function "as elohim" for Aaron. The Hebrew uses a doubled hu' ("he") for emphasis and parallel le- + noun constructions to express these functional roles.

Key words

• di.ber- ("he will speak", H1696G) — piel stem (intensive/factitive) in sequential perfect, continuing the narrative chain from the preceding verses; the piel here conveys the ongoing act of speaking as Aaron's assigned task.
• hu' ("he", H1931) — personal pronoun repeated twice in the verse (once before dibber, once before yihyeh), reinforcing which subject performs each action rather than being grammatically required.
• yih.yeh- ("he will become", H1961) — qal imperfect, paired with the preceding sequential perfect hayah, expressing durative/future "becoming" rather than a single completed act.
• Peh ("a mouth", H6310G) — masculine singular noun functioning as predicate after le-, forming the idiom "to be le- [something]" meaning "to serve as/function as."
• lo.Him ("a god", H0430G) — plural noun form, here functioning as predicate after le-, parallel to lefeh, describing Moses' role relative to Aaron.

What the text says

The verse contains two parallel clauses joined by ve ("and", H9001/H9002), each built on the same syntactic pattern: subject + hayah/yihyeh ("to be/become") + le- ("for/as") + predicate noun. In the first clause, hu' ("he", H1931, referring to Aaron) yihyeh-lekha lefeh — literally "will be to you for a mouth" — meaning Aaron will function as Moses' mouth. In the second, 'atah ("you", H0859A, Moses) tihyeh-lo lelohim — "will be to him for elohim" — meaning Moses will function toward Aaron as elohim. This le- + noun construction is a common Biblical Hebrew idiom expressing "to serve in the capacity of," not simple identity.

The repeated hu' pronoun before both dibber and yihyeh is not strictly required by Hebrew syntax (the verb forms already encode third-person subject) and adds emphasis, marking clearly that it is Aaron, not Moses, who will speak.

Differences between versions

The Hebrew lelohim ("for elohim", H0430G, plural form) is rendered differently across versions. The LXX has τὰ πρὸς τὸν θεόν ("the things pertaining to God"), and the Vulgate has in his quæ ad Deum pertinent ("in those things which pertain to God") — both paraphrasing the functional role rather than translating elohim directly as a predicate noun equivalent to "a god." The Hebrew's le- + noun idiom (parallel to lefeh, "for a mouth") is structurally symmetrical in the source text but this parallelism is less visible in the Greek and Latin renderings, which shift from a direct predicate noun to a prepositional phrase about "matters concerning God."